


Valley of the Queen

by gallifreyburning



Series: Thousand Miles [2]
Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Jupiter Ascending Fic Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 20:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4891009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jupiter sends Caine on a hunting trip. They both end up somewhere neither of them expected. (Set a few years after the events of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3464324/chapters/7602509">The Journey of a Thousand Miles</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Valley of the Queen

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of [the third Jupiter Ascending fic challenge](http://fuckyeahjupiterascending.tumblr.com/post/129100459480/ja-fic-challenge-3-commeration).

Some days Caine wishes he’d been spliced from a domesticated strain of _lupus_ stock. It would make the transition from his former life into Jupiter’s Entitled world much easier.

If his genomegineering was part lapdoodle or chihuahua, he’d never have a second thought about idle days and weeks by her side. He’d sleep away the hours in a sunny spot of her alcazar, and he’d willingly leap into her handbag to be toted from one soiree to another. He wouldn’t have these rare, jarring moments of wistfulness over his Legion days, and even in a weird way his time in Deadland – not that he wants to go back to either place, great Void, _never_ that. Just that living minute-to-minute with the hovering specter of death, using his instincts to hunt and track, those things satisfied his latent genetic programming in a way that he occasionally misses.

His time with Jupiter is fulfilling in new and wonderfully novel ways, and not uneventful. Even in the last six months, there have been two separate assassination attempts, a kite-walling accident in the freshwater ocean of Yavadium Zed, one mole within her security forces (sent by Titus, and not – strangely enough – an actual mole splice), and a vicious wildthaller attack when his cruiser broke down on the plains of Molt. Not to mention the Entitled social events and lawsuits that occur with the regularity of a seasonal monsoon, predictable and steady.

But after a while these bursts of activity taste like sugared starch, when he craves meat – they lack the fulfillment he felt in the Legion, when his career had a philosophical purpose that intimately coincided with the wild alien aspect of his genomegineering. When he hunted regularly, when he caught a scent and followed that compass inside his head, tracking it and cornering it and claiming it.

Caine doesn’t _want_ to feel restless. By all objective measures, he has no call to. He has heaps of responsibility and plenty to keep him busy; he’s loved and appreciated and trusted. (And sexed. Very, _very_ sexed. Maybe he’s not the only one at the mercy of his own genes. Maybe as a member of a fertile terrsies population, from a world meant for harvest, Jupiter has latent bits of engineering too. Regardless, his queen is spectacularly energetic on that front.)

It doesn’t help that Jupiter’s alcazar is currently infested with construction droids, all of them puttering around like self-propelled wrecking balls. Seraphi had ten separate alcazars, and this is the fourth Jupiter has renovated – all of those redesign efforts spent on taking down the images of her predecessor.

The Entitled are a vain bunch, by and large, and Seraphi was no exception. Her palaces are filled to brimming with her effigy, moving topiary gliding through the gardens, marble busts scattered through corridors like stone guardians, Seraphi’s face gilded into frescoes on ceilings, nude statuary in the bathing suites (Caine once noted aloud that Jupiter is identical to Seraphi in every way, which earned him a frown and a gentle kick to the shin).

Caine can only imagine how offputting it would be, to find his own graven face around every corner. Well, his own graven face that belonged to someone who lived before he was born. He doesn’t blame Jupiter for the renovations, but the dust and the noise and the hubbub pile right on top of his natural lupine restlessness, until he’s feverish and trembling with it. He can hardly bear to lie down at night and he’s pouncing at shadows (and pouncing at construction droids; there's a separate budget for that).

Jupiter definitely notices. It’s terrible, that Jupiter notices. Not because she gets angry or resentful; but because she’s understanding and accommodating.

He’s worried she might think that he's ungrateful, or that she isn’t enough for him. Instead, she smiles at him – a slightly sad smile, he thinks – and to stop him from quietly shredding all the couch cushions in the alcazar, she sends him on an errand.

He does as he’s asked, hunting down the digitabloid reporter responsible for the camera Caine discovered in her bedroom, and making sure every last scrap of video was destroyed. Jupiter could have gone the legal route, filing suit against the media conglomerate and chasing down the reporter through the courts, but handling the matter privately is the only way to ensure the footage doesn’t “accidentally” leak during the proceedings. It’s a pleasant errand, anyway – it involves protecting Jupiter, and he gets to bribe and wheedle and intimidate, which makes for an enjoyable day’s work.

When he returns to the alcazar on Hamartia, the hallways and alcoves are still full of construction droids, the air thick with dust.

“Her Majesty isn’t here,” Nati says. Caine stares in consternation at the black swan splice, a twenty-millennia-old woman who was Seraphi's Head of Household, and who now dotingly serves Jupiter. “She told me to give you this, when you arrived.”

It’s an antiquated, terrsies thing – several pieces of paper, folded in on each other. Jupiter’s scent permeates the fibers, and Caine's name is spelled out on the front in her swirled English writing. There's a heart instead of a dot over the letter ‘i.’

Nati steps away, pretending to supervise the nearby construction droids while he peels open the first piece of paper to get at the second one, inside.

_FETCH._

He reads the word three times, flips over the page looking for more, and finds nothing.

He knows what the word means, of course. Jupiter teases him sometimes, _fetch_ and _come_ and _stay,_ always goodnaturedly; he teases her, too, _your worship_ when she’s being difficult and _tsarina_ around her family, and _imperiatrix_ when she’s in a particular kind of mood in bed.

“Fetch what?” Caine says aloud, not really expecting an answer.

Nati turns toward him, black feathers along her wrists fluttering as she spreads her hands. “After you left, Her Majesty abruptly went on vacation. She forbade me to tell you where.”

Caine arches an eyebrow and reads the word again. He inhales, slow and deep, scenting Jupiter off the paper.

When he looks up, Nati’s white eyebrow is arched right back at him, her amusement obvious. “I’ve already ordered your cruiser re-stocked and refueled. It will be ready to portal within twenty clicks.”

“Will you be joining me, Ms Nati?” he asks.

She gives the invitation due consideration, head swaying on her elongated neck. “I am far too old, and far too slow.”

“Your last recode was hardly two decades ago,” he retorts. Caine knows, because once he opened a bottle of humquat liquor and convinced Nati to help him finish it. When she’s drunk, her usually subdued laugh turns into a wild honk, and she gossips like a fish-splice. It was an illuminating evening.

“I will slow you down. Her Majesty wouldn’t be pleased. I expect she’s anxious to have you by her side, as always.”

Jupiter won’t care; Jupiter will be delighted. She’s the one who bought Nati a transport called a moped for an Earth holiday called Christmas. _To help you get around the alcazar_ , she’d said, and then insisted Nati climb on behind her so she could demonstrate how to operate the machine. Caine had never seen a person molt in terror before, but black feathers littered the floor of the main hall afterward.

“An adventure will do you a gyre of good. You can wait in my cruiser, if we stop anyplace that might dirty the hem of your gown,” he says. He doesn’t insult her by promising not to ask for Jupiter's coordinates.

Nati’s blood-red irises move heavenward, in what almost looks like an eyeroll. “Perhaps next time, Mr Wise.”

“Very well, Ms Nati.” With a suppressed smile, he pivots on his heel and heads directly back to the hangar.

He tucks the note from Jupiter – the command from his queen – into the breast pocket of his overcoat, and he portals. Jupiter’s trail calls to him like a beacon, glittering and silvered, flickering steadily in the incomprehensibly vast darkness of the universe. The scent isn’t a map, or a set of coordinates set into a nav-drive; it’s a direction, an inexorable sense of being drawn from one place to another, like a magnet seeking north.

He can practically taste her fingerprints on the holographic trinkets at a gift shop on a crystalline moon. _Of course I remember her,_ the android cashier says. _Never had an Entitled in here before. She bought our entire stock of Ugga candy. We finally got a new shipment in today._ Caine’s never had Ugga candy. It tastes like fizzy dirt on his tongue, but then again, nothing ever feels or tastes or sounds quite like it should, unless he’s with Jupiter. He buys the full fresh shipment of Ugga candy, some for Jupiter and some for him to try again, when they’re together. Then he keeps following.

Deeper inside the Carina Arm, there’s a spa hovering atop a planet-sized cloud bank. Jupiter stayed for a few hours, and paid in advance for him to have a full day’s worth of RegeneX-free pampering, including a speciality wing preening. He takes a credit in lieu of the ridiculously expensive treatment. At his next stop, on the irradiated husk of a mined-out asteroid, he hands it off to a stranger. (Jupiter wouldn’t mind, he decides.) The elderly marsupial splice stares at the gold-plated billet in bafflement, and Caine ducks his head and leaves before he gets thanked – or yelled at.

On a gas giant, inside an antigrav environmental dome, Caine has to keep his wings folded – their use is prohibited, in this place where everyone floats and air traffic is tightly regulated. He lingers near a massive mechanical strut and watches as natural sheets of glass rain against the barrier, shattered perpetually by the mint green vortex outside. The resultant ambient noise, like pulverized wind chimes, is unsettling. Caine follows Jupiter’s scent, and waits his turn in line at a noodle vendor. The noodles are delicious, and the metal chip he gets as change definitely came from Jupiter’s coinpurse.

Each stop is a breadcrumb, dotting all the along the heart of the Carina Arm, toward the center of the gyre. He fully surrenders to his genomgineered need to hunt, to track and claim the quarry for himself. It drives him like a creature possessed – he hardly sleeps, hardly eats, willingly loses himself to the mission.

When he finally catches up to Jupiter, he lands on the wrong continent. It’s a terrsies world, long overdue for harvest, teeming with hairless humanoids with iridescent blue skin. At the sight of him, winged and pink and clad in gear black as pitch, they shriek and fall to the ground in hysterics. Caine apologizes to the grey Keepers who show up to cover his tracks, and retreats to his cruiser to do some recalculations.

A few hours later he’s on the opposite side of this small globe, circling close to a dwarf star. He goes through a quick sonic rinse, to rid himself of the stench and dust of half a dozen other worlds, and he goes to his queen.

A desert of purple sand stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction. The only significant topography are the pitted grey monuments rising from the dry plains, an ancient site of worship turned into a tourist destination for the natives of this world. All-terrain transports full of gawking iridescent sightseers circle around the monolith bases like ants circling a picnic, and viewing platforms provide vistas from afar.

Jupiter stands on one of the platforms, both her hands resting on a levitating safety barrier that hums with plasma-fused electricity, and she stares at the largest humanoid-shaped monolith. She’s wearing a long skirt, with a matching scarf wrapped around her head, to ward off the strong wind. Fabric billows around her like a flag whipping in a gale. Kiza is beside her, and the two women are uncharacteristically silent. 

Stinger and a small security force linger a respectful distance away. Caine gives a nod of acknowledgement to them; Stinger smirks and taps his neck, as if noting the time on his chronometric implant. 

He wants to fly to Jupiter, to tackle and pin her and kiss and lap at her neck in greeting. Instead, he pads silently across the platform, wings flared a tad in case she turns around, because she likes the way they look. The trail he’s been following the last few days was like a ghost, pale and vapid. Approaching her now, her scent is dizzying – warm and comforting, full of life and more substantial than anything else in the universe.

Caine has hunted his quarry, and cornered her on this small backwater world. Next he ought to claim the quarry for himself, and mark her as a trophy. Instead he feels the instinct to surrender, to drop onto his face the same way those irridescent blue terrsies did at the sight of him, to worship at her feet. 

Of course, if he groveled out of love and devotion, Jupiter would laugh and drop to the ground beside him, so they were prostrate together. She would poke and tickle him and whisper what a marvelous wonder he is, until he asked if she wanted to watch the newest episode of _Sargorn Housewives of the Cleopides_ and she volunteered to pop the popcorn.

Caine feels content. At peace. _Whole._

Sidling up to the railing beside Jupiter, he bows his head. “Your majesty.”

She twitches in surprise, and then a smile spreads across her face. On the other side of Jupiter, Kiza groans, "Caine, you're early! Now I owe Dad two C's."

“Four days!” Jupiter says proudly, linking an arm inside his elbow. Her flank presses against his hip, and he instinctively extends one wing around her back, to shield her from the wind and fine purple dust whipping off the plain. “Stinger said it would take you six.”

“It would take Stinger six,” Caine replies. “But he isn’t me.”

“We made it too easy,” Kiza says. "We'll have to travel farther next time, to give him some sport."

“What do you say? Was our game of galactic hide-and-seek too easy?" Jupiter asks, lifting her eyebrows at him.

"No,” he replies, trying not to lean into her. He’s aching to fall to his knees and press his face against her belly, feel her fingers in his hair and the way her voice trills through her chest. He’ll do that later, in private. For now, he keeps his knees locked, and stays upright. “It was perfect.”

“But you could still track me, if the trail was harder to follow?" 

Of course he could - unconscious in a fertility clinic in Chicago; or falling through an inferno in a RegeneX refinery on the planet Jupiter; or huddled in the far reaches of her alcazar's labyrinthine closet, hiding behind a shoe rack to avoid dinner with the Prime Magistrate of Orous. "I could find you anywhere."

"If you'll pardon me, majesty, I'm going to go start making plans with Dad, for the next time around. I told him we ought to go through the Great Rift, to throw you off the trail," Kiza says, bobbing a sloppy curtsy before she sweeps away from the railing, toward the rest of Jupiter's party. 

Now that they're alone, Jupiter allows herself to study him. "You’re feeling … happy?” 

"Very." With just a tad of presumption, he leans down to press his lips against hers, gentle and chaste for the moment. “It was a fine hunt, with irresistible quarry.”

Her grin is huge, and infectious. She bounces on her toes once, swaying into him. “Yay!”

Smiling, he lifts his attention to the plain full of monuments in front of them. In the center stands a large humanoid shape, thirty meters tall and distinguishably female, with strange elongated shapes jutting off its head almost like a crown. They resemble wings, worn smooth and featureless by the passage of time. A few have broken off, tumbled into the purple sand, but even so the design is all too familiar.

He squints at the statue. “Is that –”

“Seraphi,” Jupiter finishes for him. “Yeah. This is one of her – _my_ – planets.”

Caine bites his tongue. Jupiter answers anyway; his unspoken questions might as well be written across his furrowed forehead.

“Nati recommended a stop here. I thought it was neat at first, like the pyramids at Giza or something. Then I had my sheave translate the local guidebooks.” Jupiter gestures at the statue. “Thousands of years ago, Sep was the primary diety of these people. She was their savior. They sacrificed two dozen infants at her feet every year, in tribute to her eternal youth and to honor the memory of her intervention.” Jupiter shivers. Caine’s wing flutters against her side, folding her in closer. “The infant thing stopped a long while ago, thank goodness.”

“What intervention?” Caine asks.

Jupiter blinks and takes a deep breath, still staring at the statue. “This was the last world slated to be harvested, before she was murdered. Seraphi refused to send in the reaping machines, and she and Balem argued. He never harvested this world, after she died – he planted the seeds of her religion here and let it live on, a planet-sized shrine to his mother and her kooky final wish, I guess? A monument to her foolish last stand?” She leans her cheek against Caine’s arm. “All these billions of people survived, because of Seraphi. They’re still here, going on about their days, and it was the last thing she did. She died, and they lived.”

The metal structure of Caine’s wing folds tighter around Jupiter’s shoulders. “Nati sent you here?”

“All those statues in all her houses that Seraphi put up herself, out of – I don’t know, vanity or hubris. She was someone different to each person she knew: mother, political savant, mogul, masochist, fashion icon, narcissist, socialite beauty - geez, it seems like I discover something new about her every week. But on this planet, Seraphi was something else entirely. She was a savior.” Jupiter squeezes his forearm. “Nati wanted me to see another side of the woman she loved and served for so long. And I sent you off on a wild goose chase –”

“Your majesty is distinctly un-gooselike,” Caine murmurs.

“Honk honk,” she says dryly, shooting him a sideways glance before focusing on the statue again. “I thought I was sending you off on a hunt, and taking a holiday. But Nati sent me here to hunt for something, too. I keep tearing down Seraphi’s statues, because I’m afraid of losing myself and turning into the woman she was. But maybe I have it the wrong way around; maybe the culmination of Seraphi’s hundred thousand years of life was becoming the woman I already am.”

There’s something to be said about Caine’s genomegineering, and Jupiter’s naturally occurring genetic predispositions. There’s something to be said about the latent, predatory portions of DNA – whether artificially spliced from wolf stock or naturally occurring in a purebred human genome. There’s even more to be said about compassion and reason, and the choices that are made out of those traits, choices that have nothing to do with genomegineering or hereditary destiny, not at all.

Neither of them says any of those things. They hold onto each other for a few silent moments, surveying the sandy purple plain full of tourists, and the larger-than-life monument of the woman whose sacrifice spared their planet. Not a single one of those tourists turn their eyes toward the viewing platform. None of them witness the flesh-and-blood miracle standing in their midst.

“Take me home?” Jupiter asks.

She doesn’t mean any of her alcazars, of course. “I’ll let Stinger know to set coordinates for Earth.”

“No," she says, reaching for his hand. "Just you and me.”

He touches his lips to the crown of her head. It's remarkable, that someone so small can also be so fierce and strong. Caine has been stumbling around, trying to figure out how to bend himself so he fits into her universe; and Jupiter is always marching forward, bending the universe around herself. It's all right if that forward march sometimes sidesteps to Earth. There aren't any monuments there commemorating Jupiter's role as savior, there are no sacrifices in her name or cults to deify her. But there's pizza and soda and chocolate, and a romantic little path to stroll along the Chicago River. There are arguments and celebrations with her family, and occasionally even windows to clean and toilets to scrub. 

"My cruiser's just behind the souvenir shop," he says.

"Perfect. I want to stop in and buy a magnet for Mama's refrigerator. She'll never believe this."


End file.
